Case Study: Development of Project Management Framework

Transport | Medium Size | Australia

As a medium sized Transport business that was growing in size, with an increased volume of Projects, they embarked on a new Project to establish an Organisational PMO. The PMO would be established from scratch, assisting the organisation in managing its Project Portfolio. The Project Portfolio consisted of a number of Project Types including Product Development, Continuous Improvement and IT Projects. A key feature of the organisation was that the Project Portfolio was diverse in terms of individual projects size and complexity, so scaling and agility of processes and methodologies was a requirement.

Working collaboratively with the PMO Manager a scaleable and agile PMO Framework was developed based on guiding principles. Mandatory governance requirements were established based on the categorisation of the project. Existing processes were incorporated into the framework where appropriate and a full end to end Governance Management Approach developed.

Growing business with a need to implement a PMO and in doing so, bring standardisation and rigour to project governance and methodology to enable organisational roll up, reporting and alignment to strategy across all pillars of the business to enable projects to be stopped or started according to the Project Scoring process.

PMO support was provided on an ad hoc basis against large programs only. A number of GMs initiated Projects and in some instances dependencies between them were missed. Initial levels of PMO resource were insufficient to undertake a full PMO Implementation. This meant that the PMO could not be established with sufficient speed in response to the growth of the project portfolio.

AMO were appointed to collaborate with the PMO Manager to provide an ‘implementable’ PMO framework with a full suite of supporting documentation, processes and project artefacts from ideation through to benefits realisation. This was delivered in an agreed 6-8-week window to meet the requirements of the organisation.